Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour Bust

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, treated Italian unification as an international political problem. Born in Turin in 1810, he became prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1852. Economic modernization and parliamentary alliances gave his government a base for action abroad.

Participation in the Crimean War helped bring the Italian question into European diplomacy. An alliance with Napoleon III then made war against Austria possible in 1859, though the outcome did not follow Cavour's plans exactly. Foreign rulers set limits of their own. Cavour had to respond to them.

Garibaldi's campaign in southern Italy in 1860 created another challenge. Cavour supported the expansion of the Savoy state while trying to contain the risks of independent military action and republican ambition. Annexations and plebiscites contributed to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

When Cavour died that June, Rome was still under papal government. It became part of Italy in 1870, nine years later. His achievement therefore belongs to an unfinished process, one in which diplomacy, popular mobilization, and competing political strategies never operated under a single person's complete control.